She cries out, arches her spine, head thrown back, hair hanging between her shoulder blades, her fingers splayed, arms in a V behind her, extended and straining. I lift her, suddenly conscious of myself within her inside that structure of dark materials, and as I strain, taking her weight, suddenly in that moment I am aware of the bridge above us, towering into the grey evening with its own patterns and criss-crossing and massed Xs, its own feet and legs and balanced stresses, its own character and presence and life; above us, above me, pressing down. I struggle to support that crushing weight - Abberlaine arches further, shouting; grips my ankles with her hands - then comes down groaning like some crumpling structure, my own invasive addition to the girl's body (structural member, indeed) pulsing with its own brief beat.
Abberlaine collapses on top of me, panting and relaxing; limbs sprawled. She lies on me, breathing hard, perfumed hair tickling my nose.
I ache. I am exhausted. I feel like I have just fucked the bridge.
I stay inside her, softening but not withdrawing; after a while she squeezes me from inside. It is enough. We start to move again, more slowly, more softly,
Later, in the bed which was cold but which warms quickly, I carefully remove all the black material (part of its effect, we decide, is to more exactly delineate areas for a concentrated programme of caresses). This final time takes the longest, and contains, like the best works, many different movements and changes of tempo. Its climax chills me though; something makes it worse than joyless, makes it frightening, terrifying.
She is beneath me. Her arms grip around my sides and back; towards the end she wraps her slim, strong legs round me, pushing at my rump and the small of my back.
My orgasm is nothing; a detail from the glands, an irrelevant signal from the provinces. I shout out, but not with pleasure, not even from pain. That gripping, this pressure, this containing of me as though I am the body to be dressed, enfolded, strapped and parcelled, lined and laced, sends something crashing through me: a memory. Ancient and fresh, livid and rotten at once; the hope and fear of release and capture of animal and machine and meshing structures; a start and an end.
Trapped. Crushed. Little death, and that release. The girl holds me, like a cage.
'I must go.' She holds out her hand as she comes back from the fireside with her clothes. I take her hand, squeeze it. 'Wish I could stay,' she says, looking sad, clutching her few thin pieces of clothing to her pale body.
'That's all right.'
A few hours. Her family expect her now. She dresses, whistling, unselfconscious. A foghorn sounds from far away. It is quite dark beyond the shuttered windows.
One quick trip to the bathroom; she finds a comb, brandishing it triumphantly. Her hair is hopelessly tangled, and she has to be patient, sitting, coat on, on the edge of the bed while I carefully comb her hair, making it smooth again. She digs into a coat pocket and comes out with a small pack of thin cigars and a book of matches. Her nose wrinkles.
'This whole place smells of sex,' she announces, taking out a cigar.
'It doesn't, does it?'
She turns to look at me, holding out the pack of cigars; I shake my head. 'Hmm. Disgusting behaviour,' she pronounces, lighting up. I comb her hair, slowly removing the entangled results. She blows smoke-rings, grey Os, towards the ceiling. She puts one hand onto mine, moving it along with the comb. She sighs.
A kiss before she goes, face washed, breath fragrant with the grey smoke. 'I'd stay if I could,' she tells me.
'Don't worry. You were here for a while; you came here in the first place.' I would like to say more but I cannot. That terror of being crushed, of being trapped, is with me still, like an echo deep inside me, still resonating. She kisses me.
When she has gone, I lie for a while in the large, cooling bed, listening to the foghorns. One horn is quite close; I may not be able to sleep tonight, if the fog doesn't clear. There is a faint, fading hint of smoke in the air. On the ceiling the discoloured rings on the plaster look like imprinted smoke-rings branded there by Abberlaine Arrol's cigar. I breathe in deeply, trying to catch the last traces of her perfume. She is right; the room does smell of sex. I am thirsty and hungry. It is only mid-evening; I get up and have a bath, then dress slowly, feeling pleasantly tired. I am putting the lights out, front door already open, when I see the glow coming from a doorway across the cluttered room. I close the door, go to investigate.
It is an old library, shelves bare. There is a television screen at one end, switched on. My heart seems to beat somewhere in my throat, but then I realise the picture is not the usual one. The screen is white, a textured blankness, I go to switch it off, but before I can, something dark closes over the view, then withdraws. A hand. The picture shakes, then settles on the man in the bed. A woman moves away from the camera; she goes to stand near the edge of the screen. She lifts a brush and pulls it slowly through her hair, staring ahead at at what must be a mirror on the wall. The view of the man in the bed is altered only slightly otherwise; a chair has been shifted, and the bed is not quite as neat as it was.
After a while the woman puts the brush down, leans forward, one hand to her brow, then pulls back again. She picks up the brush and moves away, passing in a dark blur beneath the camera. I don't get a good look at her face.
My mouth is dry. The woman reappears at the bedside, wearing a dark coat. She stands looking down at the man, then bends and kisses him on the forehead, smoothing some hair away from his brow as she does so. She picks a bag up from the floor, and leaves. I switch the set off.
There is a phone on the wall of the kitchen. The noise is there, not quite regular, perhaps a little faster than before.
I leave the apartment, take a lift to the train deck.
It is foggy; lights make yellow and orange cones out of the thick vapour. Trams and trains pass, hooting and clanking. I wander along the walkway on the outside of the bridge, hand on the tall rail at the walkway's lip. Fog blows softly through the girders; foghorns sound from the hidden sea.
People pass by, mostly railmen. I smell steam within the fog, and coal smoke and diesel fumes. In a railway workers' shed, uniformed men sit round tables, reading papers, playing cards, drinking from large mugs. I walk on. The bridge shudders beneath my feet, and a crashing, grinding, metallic noise comes from somewhere ahead. The noise echoes through the bridge, reflecting from the secondary architecture, bouncing through the fog-curdled air. I walk through a dense silence, then the foghorns sound, one after another. I hear trains and trams nearby slowing, stopping. Ahead, sirens and klaxons burst into life.
I walk by the very edge of the bridge, through the glowing fog. My legs ache again, my chest throbs dully as though in sympathy. I think of Abberlaine; the memory of her ought to make me feel better, but it does not. It was in a haunted apartment; the ghosts of that mindless noise and that nearly unchanging picture were there all the time, a hand's notion away, a switch-turning away, probably even when I first kissed her, even while her four limbs gripped me and I cried out in terror.
The trains are silent now; nothing has passed me in either direction for some minutes. Klaxons and sirens compete with the baying foghorns.
Yes, very sweet and good indeed, and I would love to dwell on that fresh memory, but something in me will not let this happen; I try to recreate the smell and feel and warmth of her, but all I can recall is that woman calmly brushing her hair, looking into an invisible mirror and brushing, brushing. I try to remember the way the room looked, but see it only in black and white, from up in one corner, just one bed in the clutter, and a man in it.